Auxiliary Memory

When I Was A Martian

A popular new book out now is The Martian by Andy Weir, his first novel, about an astronaut Mark Watney stranded on Mars after his fellow crewmen think he’s dead and they have to leave quickly to save their own lives. Watney is part of the Ares 3 mission, and his story is very much like last year’s film, Gravity, where a solo astronaut must use his scientific wits to stay alive for hundreds of days in an environment that relentlessly keeps trying to kill him. Watney is like a modern day Robinson Crusoe. The Martian is a bit of a publishing sensation because it started out as a free ebook at the author’s web site, later became a 99 cent Kindle ebook, then a New York Times bestseller published by Crown, and finally is being promised to be made into a major motion picture. The story is as good as the book’s success.

I raced through The Martian because it was a riveting read despite the fact that it’s very technical. If you’ve ever dreamed of being an astronaut on a mission to Mars, then this book is for you.

Watney thinks of himself as a Martian, because he’s the only living being on Mars. When I was a kid I used to pretend I was a Martian. Back in the 1950s, flying saucers were a big thing with the nutty folk, and when I heard that some flying saucer conspiracy crazies thought the U.S. Air Force kept secrets about UFO’s at Wright-Patterson AFB, where I was born in 1951, I imagined that I was secretly a Martian raised by my human parents who didn’t know their real kid had been swapped by Air Force brass. If was a fun fantasy to explain why I was so different from my mother, father and sister.

I don’t know when I first heard about Mars, but it seems like it’s always been something I knew about, like dinosaurs. I’m sure Mars was programmed in my brain before I could even talk, by Saturday morning cartoons and Saturday afternoon science fiction movies. By the late 1950s when I started reading books for fun, I immediately searched out books on Mars, both fiction and nonfiction. Before the summer of 1965 I had read enough books on Mars to have endless fantasies about ancient dead cities and the exotic aliens that had built the canals.

I had read many books about Mars, but the one that really hooked me on science fiction was Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein, the first Heinlein book I ever read, back in 1964. I was twelve when I read that book, the legendary Golden Age of Science Fiction. By the time I turned 13 that same year, on November 25th, I had read every Heinlein book I could find.

It was a crushing blow by mid-July 1965 when the Mariner 4 spacecraft flew by Mars and took a handful of grainy black and white photos that invalidated all my science fictional dreams. Mars was as dead as the Moon, and the beautiful canals were replaced by goddamn craters. Heinlein’s speculative fiction about Mars was now just fantasy novels like the Oz books. No more old ones, no more Willis, and no more Barsoom.

By high school, and the Moon landing in July of 1969, I knew Mars was cold and inhospitable, but for some strange reason I still wanted to go there. I still wanted to be a Martian. I was so excited by Viking 1 and 2 landing on Mars in 1976, that I continued to dream that I might get to Mars someway, even though I was much too old to believe such bullshit. Over the years NASA landed many spacecraft on Mars, each filling out the real details of the planet that so mesmerized me as a child. Mars is very well explored. It’s not a very nice place for humans. It’s very cold, with plenty of radiation, and no real air to breathe.

After the Apollo program in the 1970s I just assumed NASA would land men and women on Mars in my lifetime. Boy was I wrong. In 1996 Robert Zubrin came out with The Case for Mars that made a whole lot of sense about how to get to Mars. His ideas are the basis of the Ares missions in The Martian. I thought for sure such a brilliant, logical plan would lead to real missions. But nothing has ever come of Zubrin’s dreams either. The Mars Society is ever hopeful, but I don’t believe manned missions to Mars will happen before I die.

I no longer want to be a Martian. That’s my main criticism of Andy Weir’s book—even though it’s a very realistic book, it never describes how harsh the Martian environment is, and how unpleasant it would be to try to live there. Weir doesn’t convey the brutal cold or the relentless radiation, or the insidious regolith. Only a mad geologist could love Mars. The real Mars has no romance. It’s definitely not an exotic destination of fictional adventure. It’s a dead world, a world of rocks and more rocks.

I even wonder why astronauts would want to go there, or why thousands would sign up to be one-way colonists.

That’s the trouble with the romance of space travel, and the dreams of science fiction. Every place were we could land that’s not Earth is just rocks. Rocks and radiation, and freeze-in-an instant cold, or melt-the-flesh hot. I guess I’ve just gotten old. Old guys don’t like cold.

I used to be a Martian. I used to be a Martian when we knew nothing about Mars. The older I get the more I realized that Earth is the only place that humans can live. And dang if we aren’t hell bent on turning Earth into Venus.

JWH – 6/10/14

New v. Old, and Old v. Young

We live in a society enamored with both the new and the young, so being old is hard, especially while we watch old things fading. As you grow old you treasure the past and old things more and more, and your ability to keep up with new things and understand the young gets harder and harder. One of the hardest thing about being old is trying to stay young, both in body and mind. Menopause and erectile dysfunction are cruel reminders that staying young at heart can even feel foolish. Sagging flesh, hair loss, wrinkles, age spots, varicose veins, gnarled fingers tells others we’re old even though on the inside we still feel nineteen. But should we still try to act nineteen?

Getting old is both fascinating and cruel. For most of our time on Earth we feel our life is in front of us, but then that changes, and slowly we realize that we have little to look forward to and much to look back on. The tendency is to try to stay young in mind, and patch-up our our tired old bodies so we can keep going. Staying young at heart requires the existential endurance of Sisyphus. The trouble is acting young makes us look old and silly. Sure, a few like Mick Jagger can pull off wearing hot fashions and acting twenty, but most of us would look like pug dog in a funny outfit.

Today’s technology allows old pop culture and new pop culture to co-exist simultaneously. When I was young that wasn’t true. My parents had their old pop culture they mostly remembered, and we had our new music, movies, television shows and books that dominated the pop culture landscape. Back then, we even had a name for it – the Generation Gap. Today, old people can love new stuff, and young people can love old stuff.

Do I remain young if I’m watching the second season of Orange is the New Black and running Ubuntu 14.04 on a machine I built myself? Would I be younger still if I watched stolen copies of HBO shows on a Mac Air? I’m rather clueless about the latest trends in hipness. But I have noticed something about my peers. Some only listen to 1960s music and watch reruns of 1970s television shows, and they marvel that I listen to Katy Perry and Mumford and Sons. I do try to go back to my old favorite shows of youth, like The Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis and Star Trek, but I can’t focus on them. I don’t know if that’s because I’m too old, or the shows are too old.

Don’t get me wrong I do love some old stuff. I’m listening to 1967 albums this morning as I write, and I’m reading Possession about 19th century fictional poets because I love the 19th century. But I also read modern books like The Goldfinch and The Martian. Is my ability to enjoy contemporary pop culture keeping me young, or was I born with the genes that make me like contemporary pop culture?

There are many popular trends I can’t comprehend. I can’t get into video games. I want to. They look cool. But I buy them and just don’t know what to do. I’m also embarrassed by comic books and movies based on comic books – they seem too much for children. I’m going to catch a lot of flack for this, but I can understand Ruth Graham’s POV in her essay “Against YA” even though I read and loved The Fault in Our Stars. I’m one of those old people that read YA fiction – occasionally. I also read Pulitzer and Booker prize winning novels too. I’m not quite embarrassed to read YA, but I am for comics. Is that my 1950s upbringing showing? I wasn’t too old to enjoy music videos in the early 1980s on MTV, but I am way to old to watch MTV today without cringing.

At 62 I find it hard to relate to anyone under 40. It’s strange, but I enjoy the company of people born closest to 1951, the year I was born. Rarely, I’ll meet a young person that actively studies baby boomer pop culture, or parts of it, and I find that rather strange. We’ll have a common interest, and I’m more than happy to talk about the old days with them, but I can’t fathom why they like my old stuff. Was I any different in my twenties talking to old guys about Big Band music of the 1930s?

I think old and young people can share old stuff and new stuff, but I’m not sure we’re seeing it in the same way. And if old people enjoy new stuff, does that make them youthful? And if young people like old stuff, does that make them mature? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to think about.

JWH – 6/9/14

Are Humans Smart Enough?

We humans are quite proud that we’re the smartest species on the planet, but are we smart enough to survive? Evolution has been characterized as survival of the fittest, but what happens if one species succeeds so well that it kills off all other species and self-destructs? That’s not very smart, that’s just being cancerous. The trouble is we don’t think as a species, but as a collection of individuals, and our self-interests are now in conflict with our species best interests. The Republican party, and many Americans have chosen to just ignore global warming in favor of self-interests. Is that a realism that we must just accept? This morning at Vox.com they presented “7 reasons America will fail on climate change.”

Ezra Klein is totally pessimistic that Americans will change, and he makes quite a good case with his seven reasons why we will fail to do anything significant about climate change. The trouble is as individuals we don’t change until we’re force to, and it looks like we won’t be force to until after we’ve reached a point of no return.

One point that Klein didn’t make is people who want to be politicians do it for reasons of self-interest and not altruism for the species. Even if young people start out idealistic about saving the world, the political system corrupts them by forcing them into a game of political self-preservation which corrupts them into selling out. But we don’t see many save-the-world young people going into politics anyway. Instead, the newest politicians with the most passion are Tea Party types who want to do just the opposite.

The only counter trend to this pessimistic black hole is technology. Cars were invented just as cities were about to drown in horseshit. If clean energy alternatives become way cheaper than carbon producing non-renewable resources then things might change. But what if there are other technological changes that might help? What if technology changes politics? Hasn’t the Internet already changed the political climate?

This will sound silly now, but what if we replaced our political representatives with AI machines? This will sound facetious, but obviously we’re not smart enough to solve our own problems, so what if it was obvious to all that someone smarter was, a brilliant machine? Would our individual self-interests vote for it? Right now politics is more of a personality contest than electing the best person for the job. What if a robot was an option, one that knew a thousand times more about the issues of your district than any human?

We will always be surprised by unexpected game changers. Klein might be right, and we’re already defeated, but we never know when a black swan might show up.

JWH – 6/7/14

Consuming Inspiration

We eat food to fuel our bodies, but I read nonfiction essays and watch documentaries to feed my soul. Every day I consume inspiration like a vampire consumes blood. Inspiration keeps me alive.

A Powerful Punch in the Gut

The older I get the more aware I am of my inevitable fate of a long lingering death. Few people like to dwell on this future. Most hope they will go quickly, or quietly in their sleep, but it’s doubtful that modern medicine will allow that. Last night I saw Life and Death in Assisted Living on PBS Frontline via my PBS Roku channel. They reported that as much as 67% of assisted living residents have some kind of dementia, and although these facilities weren’t meant to be nursing homes, they’ve become essentially unregulated care for the dying. The show attacks the big business practices of making fortunes off of end-of-lifers, but that’s not what inspired me about the show. I watched its videos seeing the elders as explorers of territory I must one day travel myself. To live with any kind of dignity while dying requires enough health to keep saying fuck you to fate. Once you are condemned to a wheelchair to be cared for like an infant it’s very hard to find meaning in life. Although I’m an atheist I’m praying like crazy for the acceptance of euthanasia by the time I get feeble. At some point before I forget too much I’ll need to get a tattoo over my heart that says in big letters: DNR. But as long as we do live, we have to keep finding inspiration and ways to make ordinary daily living meaningful.

John Green, An Impressive Young Man Who Speaks to Millions

I’m very grateful to The New Yorker for publishing “The Teen Whisperer” about John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars, and for putting the full article on the web so I can link it to my friends. I read The New Yorker via Next Issue on my tablets, and it’s always depressing to read an inspirational essay and not be able to share it with friends. Next Issue is the Netflix of digital magazines offering 135 titles for $15 a month. I wished Next Issue had a desktop web app, or Windows application like Spotify, that made sharing fantastic reads easier with fellow members.

But back to John Green. Read the Margaret Talbot article linked above to see just how cool John Green is as young writer and internet entrepreneur. Green’s web presence allowed The Fault in Our Stars to be a bestseller long before it was published and gave him the opportunity to autograph the entire first printing of 150,000 copies of his book before they went on sale, which cost Green ten weeks of time and a lot of physical therapy. Green and his brother Hank also produce the Crash Course series on YouTube. Between those educational courses and his Nerdfighter followers, Green has a fandom to make anything he writes an instant hit.

If you haven’t read The Fault in Our Stars then you’ve been staring at your iPhone way too much. The book is magnitudes more powerful than it’s hype, so go get a copy if you haven’t. By the way, be prepared to cry your guts out, and that even applies to macho moronic dickheads. In Norway the book was titled Fuck Fate, so don’t think of it as just another YA teenager read. I don’t know if Green has lasting literary talent, but he certain Babe Ruthed one out of the park with The Fault in Our Stars.

Worry Less About The Future

Right-wing conservative global warming deniers all cry in Chicken Little unison that doing the right thing about climate change will destroy our economy. Well, Ramez Naam points out in his essay “Reducing Carbon Emissions Will Be Cheaper Than Expected – It Always Is” that in the past after everyone ran around crying the economy would collapse, it didn’t.

We need to do something about CO2 pollution, and we need to do it fast. Probably if we spent as much time and money on converting energy sources as trying to build the F-35 fighter we’d be mostly done by now. We could fix the carbon pollution problem in a decade if we applied ourselves. Much could be done with just conservation, and a tremendous lot could be accomplished by switching energy sources. Anyone should be able to see that altering the environment is dangerous, and burning coal is stupid. The goal should be something like converting carbon to coal and burying it, not burning it. Coal was nature’s way of getting rid of CO2 in the first place.

Policy makers talk about making changes by 2050. That’s bogus shirking the responsibility. We should clean up our mess before we die, by 2025. Besides converting to a new clean economy will stimulate the economy, not kill it. Anyone who thinks otherwise lacks inspiration.

Makers and Robots

I find people who make things inspirational. And the Maker movement is a nice antithesis to digital life. Forbes covers “Maker Movement Fuels Apps, Robots, and Internet of Things.” This is a movement that is growing so rapidly that I even hear non-Geeks are talking about it. If I was a kid today I’d be totally into the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Building robots is becoming a mania. Make Magazine even recommends “10 Ways to Make Your Robot More Humanlike.” Building a robot teaches us about how bodies work. Building an AI will teach us how the mind works. If you aren’t paying attention, you might someday be shocked when humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet. Creating an AI mind should be possible but it’s going to be really hard. O’Reilly.com says, ‘“It works like the brain.” So?’ Computers can already out-do us at many intelligent tasks now.

I expect someone to invent a cyber-cortex any day now that allows machines to learn and eventually become self-aware. Maybe it will be a maker or one of those kids building robots. Maybe they will be inspired by ODROID Magazine.

JWH – 6/4/14

Nova by Samuel R. Delany–Reading Science Fiction in 1968 and 2014

Rereading a novel I loved reading almost a half-century ago is an interesting experience. Nova by Samuel R. Delany was a novel that dazzled my teenage self in 1968, but has lost its sense of wonder for my older self in 2014. I’d be awful curious to know how 17-year-olds today reading Nova feel about the book. Is the magic being 17, or 1968? Delany was only 25 when he completed Nova, so he was much closer to my age than than Robert A. Heinlein, my favorite science fiction writer at the time. Heinlein was 44 years older than me, so Delany was an exciting young writer that spoke to my generation. Delany was the same generation as The Beatles, the generation before the Baby Boomers, and the generation we grew up admiring, the one that made the 1960s. Nova in 1968 was to science fiction what The Jefferson Airplane was to the Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland generation at the time. It rocked.

It’s very hard to separate my memories of Nova from the times when I first read it, the 1960s. Nova came out around the time of The White Album by The Beatles, Crown of Creation by the Jefferson Airplane, Wheels on Fire by Cream and Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. So that music is what I listened to when I first read Nova. This was also around the time I went to see Apollo 8 launch at Cape Kennedy in December of 1968. I was in the 12th grade and I was very excited about the future, but worried about things like the Vietnam war, the generation gap, race relations and looming overpopulation. Both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in 1968. To make matters worse, the Chicago Democratic Convention happened that summer and society seemed to be in chaos.

To say the country was divided is a vast understatement. Even the world of science fiction was split into the Old Guard and New Wave, with lots of flaming rhetoric spewing between the two.

Set in the year 3172, the galaxy is divided into the Earth controlled Draco Federation, and the younger rebellious Pleiades Federation. Nova is about a mad power quest by Lorq Von Ray of the Pleiades to control the market in Illyrion, a heavy element of Delany’s invention that powers space travel and intergalactic commerce. It’s extremely rare. Von Ray learns that Illyrion is produced in abundance in the heart of a star and gathers a motley crew to fly through a nova as it happens. Von Ray and his rich family is hated by Prince Red and his sister Ruby, the heirs of an opposing wealthy family who also want to control the supply of Illyrion.

This is 1940s Planet Stories space opera, but with 1960s counter-culture swagger. Nova is colorful, epic and full of super-science sense of wonder in a New Age Science Fiction novel. When I read Nova in 1968 it was tremendously exciting. I wanted it to be a map of the future. Like most of Delany’s stories from the 1960s, it features a young wanderer, The Mouse, who plays an exotic musical instrument, a sensory syrynx, and an intellectual vagabond Katin Crawford who is writing a novel. Back then Delany often had characters writing novels and poetry inside a novel so he could comment on the meta-fiction nature of things, as well as explain the psychohistory on such things as Tarot cards.

The story has a good deal of backstory before getting down to the real mission of flying into a nova to set up the rivalry between the Von Rays and Reds, and explain the backgrounds of Mouse and Katin. The trouble is the story has more color than plot, and the older me wasn’t as dazzled by the adventure. All the characters are cyborgs that fly the ship by jacking into sensors that sail the starship on fictional interstellar energy currents. The 17 year-old-me hoped we’d eventually discover such magical properties of outer space that would allow people like me to travel between the stars like we fly between cities now. My 62 year-old-self knows all this is make-believe Santa Clausing. The story is still readable, but it’s gone from an exciting science fiction tale to a colorful fantasy fiction. My younger self should have known better, but I was awful hopeful about the Final Frontier in 1968. And I was bedazzled by hippie dreams.

Interstellar space is so much more real to me now, with it’s extremes of temperatures, varieties of lethal radiations, and most importantly, its brutally vast distances. Science fiction sorely needs to rethink how we’re going to explore the galaxy. Nova’s kind of scientific speculation is as practical as building giant canons to send people to the Moon. I don’t blame Delany for how things have changed, because Nova makes an exemplary example of 1960s science fiction. The science of Nova is quickly becoming as quaint as the science of The Skylark of Space, so such stories reflect how we used to dream of living in a very different universe.

JWH – 6/3/14